Skrjabin, Alexander (1872, 1915)

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was born in Moscow. He studied the piano from an early age, taking lessons with Nikolay Zverev, who was teaching Sergei Rachmaninoff at the same time. He later studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky, Sergey Taneyev, and Safonov. He became a noted pianist despite his small hands with a span of barely over an octave (at one point he actually damaged his hand from practicing pieces which required greater hand spans). Scriabin, previously interested in Nietzsche's Übermensch theory, also became interested in theosophy, and both would influence his music and musical thought. In 1909-1910 he lived in Brussels, becoming interested in Delville's Theosophist movement and continuing his reading of Hélène Blavatsky. Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician," (and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group."



Many of Scriabin's works are written for the piano. The earliest pieces resemble Frédéric Chopin and include music in many forms that Chopin himself employed, such as the étude, the prélude and the mazurka. Later works, however, are strikingly original, employing unusual harmonies and textures. The development of Scriabin's voice or style can be followed in his ten piano sonatas: the earliest are in a fairly conventional late-Romantic idiom and show the influence of Chopin and Franz Liszt, but the later ones move into new territory, the last five being written with no key signature.



Scriabin wrote only a small number of orchestral works, including a piano concerto (1896), The Poem of Ecstasy (1908) and Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), which includes a part for a "clavier à lumières" - an implement played like a piano, but which flooded the concert hall with coloured light rather than sound. Few performances of the piece, including the premiere, have included this light element, although a performance in New York City in 1915 projected colours onto a screen.



Though often considered derived from Scriabin's synaesthesia, a condition wherein one experiences stimulus in one sense in response to real stimulus in another sense, most likely Alexander Scriabin did not experience the physiological condition of synaesthesia, and his color system, unlike most synaesthetic experience, lines up with the circle of fifths, indicating that it was a thought-out system influenced by his theosophic readings and based on Sir Isaac Newton's Optics. However, this pioneering use of multimedia also was influenced by Scriabin's theosophical beliefs; specifically, he thought he could bring about the end and rebirth of the world through a grand performance including music, scent, dance, and light that would take place in the Himalayas.



Aaron Copland praised Scriabin's thematic material as "truly individual, truly inspired", but criticized Scriabin for putting "this really new body of feeling into the strait-jacket of the old classical sonata-form, recapitulation and all" calling this "one of the most extraordinary mistakes in all music."



A hypochondriac his entire life, Scriabin died in Moscow from septicemia. For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work, to be performed in the Himalayas, that would bring about the Armageddon, "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world." This piece, Mysterium, was, fortunately or unfortunately, never realized.

Extra bit of trivia: he was related to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian politician and eponym of the Molotov cocktail. Molotov's original surname was Scriabin.